Re: [PATCH v4 1/2] stash: reserve exit status 1 for conflicts

On Fri, Sep 4, 2026 at 5:09 PM Phillip Wood [off-list ref] wrote:

[Cc'd Karthik for a view on the CI style job]

On 04/09/2026 09:16, Harald Nordgren wrote:

quoted

quoted

A local "make style" while you develop runs

         git clang-format --style file --diff --extensions c,h

which tells the command to check only the parts of the system that
you touched.

I do not think it is used in CI.

It seems to run as part of CI and doesn't catch it then:
'.github/workflows/check-style.yml'

My recollection is that we made that job never fail because clang-format
does not always do a good job of following our style guide and the
output is not guaranteed to be stable across different versions.

Thanks for the history! Seems that when linter output is not
consistent between versions, then version pinning is necessary.

That
makes its value debatable as I don't think many people (anyone?) bother
checking the output to see what suggestions it made. It would be a lot
simpler for contributors if we just devolved style decisions to
clang-format so no one had to think about or comment on the style.

My professional opinion is that a consistent style, auto-enforceable +
auto-fixable, is extremely valuable, because it removes an entire
class of code review discussions. I almost never care which style is
chosen, as long as it's the same everywhere.

I tried today to apply the full clang-format output and it was A LOT.
Doesn't mean it shouldn't be done, but it would need to be done at a
carefully chosen time because there will be lots of conflicts on all
in-flight topics.

Whether that tradeoff is worth it depends on how far the output of
clang-format deviates from our preferred style.

In the best of worlds, the preferred style is exactly what the linter
dictates, then these two are equivalent.


Harald